An event or group movement includes the forecasting and management of a group of people that will arrive from numerous domestic and/or international locations at various times on various days via commercial flights, private jet aviation, train, bus, car service, or personal transportation. Upon the arrival of the entire group it is very common that corporate events will occur that require the logistical coordination of transporting the group to and from each planned event. Once the event has ended each person will require coordination to return to their destination city; this can take place over a period of days or within a few hours on the same day.
One of the problems encountered by the corporate travel and event management industries with regard to large events is the coordination and management of the ground transportation and greeting services for the event. For a large event such as a company meeting or a company retreat numerous individuals from various geographical locations travel to the city in which the event will take place. In many instances, there is more than one airport which may service the event location. For each of these airports there are usually many airline carriers and multiple terminals in which travelers may arrive. In order for greeters to be scheduled to meet travelers at the time of arrival at the gate for the particular terminal and for travelers to be met by a chauffeur in a scheduled vehicle provided by a ground transportation company, someone must coordinate and solve the problem of hundreds of travelers arriving and departing at different terminals at both scheduled and unscheduled times. Typically the variables involved with solving this problem are the particular airport they will arrive or depart from, terminal of arrival or departure, scheduled time of arrival or departure, any change in scheduled flight time, number of individuals arriving at or departing from a particular terminal during that particular time period, and the number of travelers a greeter or a ground transportation vehicle can accommodate. With hundreds of travelers, multiple airport arrivals and departures at various terminals, flight delays, it is difficult for someone to schedule ground transportation vehicles and greeters.
An example of such an event and scenario would be as follows: an event is located in the Washington, D.C. area, hundreds of travelers would be traveling by air to three different airports (i.e., the Baltimore Washington Airport, Dulles Airport and National Airport), each of these airports have multiple terminals for planes to arrive. The ground transportation which will move the travelers from each of the three airports to the event location which may be in a hotel in downtown Washington, D.C., could be accomplished with various types of vehicles including sedans, limousines, SUV's, vans, minibuses, and motor coaches. Each of these vehicle types has a different capacity for carrying passengers. In order to assess which vehicle type would be used for a given pick-up at a particular terminal at a particular airport the scheduler needs to identify and group passengers that are arriving at approximately the same time in the same terminal. The scheduling is exasperated by the fact that planes may arrive early or later than scheduled, and certain vehicle types may be unavailable if stuck in traffic or still handling a previous pick-up. Other variables may also complicate solving the transportation problem such as certain passengers being VIPs and requiring separate cars or special vehicles for their transportation.
Additional challenges occur when people are arriving and departing at the same time on scheduled domestic and customs flights that require check in two hours prior to departure and an undetermined amount of time to go through customs on arrivals.
Similar issues exists with the scheduling of greeters to meet passengers on their arrival at airport terminals and direct passengers to baggage claims and vehicles. For example, depending upon the number of passengers arriving at a particular time in a particular terminal, multiple greeters may be necessary to direct the passengers to the appropriate vehicles for transportation to the event and location. Determining if a flight is arriving as a customs flight will also complicate the process and requires additional scheduling.
Assigning and managing the ground transportation can be considerably complex especially if there is a limited fleet of vehicles that are being used to transport the passengers. Determining the most efficient or optimal way to assign the vehicles and move the passengers can be difficult given all the variables that are involved in scheduling.
When a company plans a company event they may have an internal person or department responsible for managing the event, they may outsource the event to a corporate travel company or utilize the services offered by a destination management company (DMC). These people or departments will be referred to as the “Travel Manager”. Depending upon the number of attendees and geographic locations selected the Travel Manager will provide a rough ballpark estimate of the costs of the event. Typically ground transportation services are estimated as a percentage of the total cost for the event. e.g., 10%. Sometimes, the ground transportation service costs are estimated based upon the ground transportation cost for a prior event or an event which occurred in a prior year. A detailed calculation of the actual cost of the ground transportation is not typically done because it requires too many hours of manual labor by the Travel Manager.
Once the decision to have an event is made, the planning generally progresses to the next step, and the company event's person will generate a manifest of passenger attendees along with information about arrival and departure times and airlines for those passengers as well as any activities, events or dine-arounds that will require transporting the group during the event days. This manifest list is provided to the Travel Manager for their use in estimating the cost of the ground transportation. Upon receipt of the manifest the Travel Manager will typically begin a very labor intensive process of reformatting the spreadsheet to identify what days and times people are scheduled to arrive and depart and from what airport and terminal and begin a very crude grouping or assignment of passengers to vehicles. This process usually takes at least several hours and does not verify or validate information or account for any changes. Once the travel manager has completed the initial forecasted manifest, the travel manager will forward it to the local ground transportation provider which will then estimate the ground transportation costs. Typically this is a very rough cost and does not account for invalid information, changes, or optimized grouping calculations. Due to the overwhelming amount of changes and grouping variations it is very common that the quote is completely different than the actual cost. This can result in a lost opportunity to win the business or illustrate the opportunity to optimize the groupings and decrease ground transportation cost.
In addition to the ground transportation portion of the event management, the hotels involved in the event management do not have detailed information about arrival time of guests at the hotel or check out times for guests departing from the hotel.
Organizing the movement of passengers from one location to another is a complicated, time-consuming and error-prone process. There are many instruction manuals, help guides, books, time management software and seminars that provide event planning guidance. However, these tools amount to little more than common sense organizational techniques and a laundry list of “to-do” checklists.
There is a strong need to have an event management system for automating the repetitive and labor-intensive parts of the event management process, validating, verifying and automatically correcting passenger information, providing real-time pricing for rapid invoice forecasting, and automating grouping of passengers into vehicles based upon a multitude of user and system defined factors. A system for allowing better scheduling of ground transportation and providing hotels with better information of travelers arrival times is needed.